A Chinese Melting Pot

Abstract

A Chinese Melting Pot: Original People and Immigrants in Hong Kong’s First ‘New Town’ traces the transformation of Tsuen Wan from a poor and marginal district of agricultural villages, culturally distinctive in that all were Hakka. Like others present in the New Territories in 1898, they enjoyed special privileges under British colonialism as ‘original inhabitants’. This study is focused, in part, on one of their villages: its history, lineages, relationships among and through women, and their songs and laments. In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation and revolution in China, the town, with its daily coastal market, rapidly grew into a major industrial area and assumed an intense, if chaotic, urban form. Its industries attracted enormous numbers of immigrants from China, who created a large variety of voluntary associations to ease their adaptation to the new environment, while the original inhabitants, as property owners, benefited financially from the immigrants’ need for housing, and politically from continuing government support. In the 1980s, changes in economic policies in China led to Tsuen Wan’s present post-industrial form. The original inhabitants remain as a small fragment of the population, their villages intact, although re-sited away from the town centre as part of greatly increased government intervention in creating a planned ‘new town’. Their language and traditions are disappearing as they, like the immigrants, are absorbed into the wider Hong Kong lifestyle.